


And Embrace What You've Become

by Masu_Trout



Category: Deus Ex (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Blood Drinking, Erotic Vampire Bite Stroking, Finger Sucking, M/M, Power Imbalance, Vampire Turning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-05
Updated: 2018-09-05
Packaged: 2019-07-07 05:44:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15902073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Masu_Trout/pseuds/Masu_Trout
Summary: The attack on Sarif Industries should've left Adam dead. But David Sarif's not about to lose his best employee—not when he can make him something evenbetter.





	And Embrace What You've Become

**Author's Note:**

  * For [psychomachia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/psychomachia/gifts).



> I loved your prompts for this ship, and I really hope you enjoy the end result!

Adam woke, terrified and hungry, limbs burning with an agony that threatened to eat him from the inside out. His heart, his lungs, the very marrow inside his bones—all of it was dissolving, he thought, panicked, and that didn't make any _sense_ but what else could it possibly be, to burn him like this? 

A new form of bioweapon, maybe, an acid that attacked from the inside out... Sarif had always warned him that this job would be more dangerous than being a cop. He hadn't taken his boss's words seriously enough.

 _Bioweapon,_ Adam thought, and then, frightened for an entirely different reason, _Megan_. 

He surged upwards with a sudden burst of energy, fighting past the screaming pain to try and pull himself back to his feet. The most he managed was a vague sort of stumble upwards, grabbing onto the wall above him and then promptly toppling back to the floor on legs that no longer seemed to work right. He landed in a rough, hunched over crouch, tried to rise once more, fell again.

Fine. That was fine. He could crawl if he needed to. Sarif, he needed to warn Sarif—

Those mercenaries had torn their way through Sarif Industries' security like it had been made out of tissue paper. They'd managed things no human being ought to be able to manage. He'd seen a brute of a man throw a security guard _through_ a wall; a woman who disappeared into smoke when she was shot and reformed just as easily; a man with glistening, flayed open skin, who walked upright and talked and fought when he should have been curled up in agony and screaming on the ground. They'd found Megan, and taken her, and left Adam...

Adam remembered, suddenly and with a dizzying surge of vertigo, just how that living anatomy doll of a man had left him: torn open from shoulder to groin on massive misshapen claws that couldn't have been real and definitely were. He resisted the urge to look down or touch his stomach. It wouldn't help. If he was dying anyway, then he just had to focus on finding Sarif first. 

_Simple,_ he thought sardonically. At least that explained the pain.

Adam managed two more crawling steps before he had to lean himself against the wall again. He was in Sarif's office, somehow—hadn't he been down in the labs before? Had they brought him up here with them? God, he hoped not. If they had Sarif too, then everyone here was well and truly fucked. 

Adam was head of security. He needed to be able to stop at least one death tonight. 

He held his breath, bracing himself against the pain and the fear, and he'd stop when it started to burn in his lungs but he wasn't running out of air yet so he had to be okay. If the assassins were here for Sarif, they couldn't be far. He'd crawl to the elevator and catch them trying to escape. Stop them somehow. He wasn't sure how just yet.

A little more. Just a little more.

Adam pushed off the wall—

And froze as the sound of the office door slamming open behind him echoed through the room. Fingers curled into fists, he prepared to launch himself at the terrorists, only to stop at the sound of a familiar voice.

"Christ, Adam!" David Sarif said, aggravation and exhaustion warring for control in his voice. "The hell do you think you're doing? You're not even supposed to be up for another week, bare minimum."

"Boss," Adam mumbled. His mouth felt strange. He tried to work around it to force out the words. "Megan is... you have to..."

"Yeah, yeah, I know, son. You've been out a while. Things have gotten crazy."

Sarif dropped into a crouch and caught Adam by his elbow, keeping him something close to upright even as the pain lanced through him once more. Adam's mind felt fuzzy and strange; he kept catching his eyes darting to Sarif's wrists, then to his neck, searching for something that wasn't there.

"How long?" Adam managed. If it was only a few minutes, he might still be able to get down there in time to intercept the attackers as they left. ( _Cut open and crawling_? the rational part of his brain interjected, but he shoved the thought aside. He'd make it work.)

"Three days," Sarif said.

Adam shook his head, trying reflexively to deny the words. No. No, that couldn't be possible, Megan couldn't be...

Sarif's face swam in and out of view above him. He was looking at Adam with an expression he couldn't place, protective and proprietary all in one, and when Adam tried desperately to stand once more he grabbed hold of him and pulled him closer until he was half-straddling his boss's lap. "It's okay, Adam," he said. He tucked Adam's face against the join where his neck met his collarbone, ran a comforting hand through Adam's hair as another stab of pain wracked through Adam's body. "Rest. I'll explain everything later."

There was no time for that. Adam needed to go after the attackers, he needed—

he needed—

—his mouth felt strange against Sarif's skin. His teeth ached, his tongue was sandpaper-dry. He needed something he couldn't put words to; he only knew he wouldn't find it here. Limbs slow and sluggish, he fought against the rising tide of pain that threatened to throw him into unconsciousness once more. 

Adam thrashed weakly, trying to slip from Sarif's grip, until Sarif finally grabbed a handful of his hair, pulled him back until he was staring Adam straight in the eyes, and said, firmly, " _Sleep_ , son."

Sarif was his boss. He'd always respected the man. But somehow, no order he'd ever given had ever felt as impossible to refuse as this one. Adam blinked once, twice, and then slid bonelessly towards the ground as the pain and exhaustion all at once became too much for him to bear.

The last thing he remembered before he went under entirely was a hand brushing his cheek. And, from somewhere far away, Sarif's voice saying, "Oh, Adam, you're going to be amazing."

\---

Adam woke to the same thing he'd fallen asleep to: pain stabbing through his body, Sarif's hands on his face and voice in his ear. This time, it was two strangely-warm fingers pressed against his lips. Adam blinked and the world was hazey around him; he could see the vague shape of Sarif above him, blocky and indistinct.

"Open up, Adam?" Sarif's muffled voice came through strange and indistinct.

Adam let his mouth fall open, more out of confusion than anything else, and then Sarif's fingers slipped past his lips to press heavy on his tongue and Adam let his head fall back as he moaned. 

He didn't know what Sarif was doing. Suddenly he couldn't manage to care.

"Better, isn't it?" The smile in Sarif's voice was obvious. He slid his fingers away—Adam tried to force himself upright to follow them—and then they were back once more. Adam sucked the heavy, coppery taste off Sarif's fingers each time, swallowed it down desperately and opened his mouth to beg for more. Some part of him, watching from afar, burned with shame and confusion, but Adam couldn't focus on that when the pain that had become so deeply a part of him was suddenly retreating. He felt like a man wandering through a desert, stumbling from mirage to mirage only to finally find a true oasis.

At first, it was all he could do to swallow. As Sarif helped him, though, pieces of him began to return; his fingers twitched on his command, the muscles in his legs tensed and relaxed when he tried to move, the blurry shape above him began to resolve into David Sarif's face. 

Adam watched as Sarif rubbed his thumb against Adam's chin, wiping away a line of drool from his slack mouth. He watched as Sarif pulled his spit-covered fingers away. He watched as Sarif's fingers disappeared somewhere and then reappeared a moment later, coatied with something shiny and slippery and bright jewel-red, something that smelled like iron and salt and made Adam's mouth water...

 _No. No, no, no, no, no_...

With a burst of panicked strength Adam threw himself backwards, kicking out at Sarif as he scrambled away. He only made it as far as the couch before his limbs started to fail again. (He was so weak, so incredibly weak, but he knew exactly what he needed to gain his strength back again and _NO_.) He pushed past the pain and exhaustion long enough to turn himself over; with his stomach guarded and his hands curled into claws he felt both less human and more able to face whatever the hell this was.

"Get the fuck away from me." Adam bared his teeth in emphasis. They bristled in his mouth like needles, sharp enough to catch and tear.

"Adam..." Sarif stretched out a hand, and an inhuman snarl ripped itself from Adam's throat as he dug his hands into Sarif's richly upholstered couch. The leather tore beneath them like it was paper.

Sarif froze. Adam froze too. He forced his hands to relax where they were caught in the stuffing of the cushions, and then he said, quietly, both terrified and numb, "What _are_ you? What did you do to me?" 

With a heavy sigh, Sarif propped his elbows on his knees and interlaced his fingers. He stared at Adam over the bridge of his folded hands. How had Adam never noticed how bright his eyes were, how strange?

"Come on, son," he said, "Let's not make this a whole big production. I think you already know the answer to that."

Adam ran his tongue across his teeth. He still tasted that coppery residue stuck between them. It all felt strange; his teeth dug into his tongue hard enough to hurt. They felt like shards of broken glass.

"Tell me you're not a vampire."

Sarif smiled wide, as if Adam'd just pointed out a particularly tricky flaw in the Sarif Industries security system and not said the single most insane thing of his entire life. "I'm not the only one. And _you_ need to eat." He looked Adam up and down. "Frankly, I'm shocked you're even capable of stringing a sentence together at this point. You're really incredible."

And there went any hope Adam had of this somehow making sense. "If you think I'm going to accept that..." He glanced towards the sack of blood ( _blood_ , what the hell) in Sarif's hands, unwilling to finish the thought.

" _Relax_ , Adam," Sarif said with a dramatic roll of his eyes. "It's a donation. You don't think I give all that money to LIMB for my health, do you?" He frowned. "Well, I guess I kind of do, but you know what I mean." He shook the bag. Adam's eyes tracked the movement entirely against his will. "And you do need it. Don't tell me you didn't notice a difference when you started eating."

Adam shook his head. Sarif was right, he couldn't deny it, but... "Answers first," he gritted out.

"What, if I don't answer your questions you're just going to let yourself starve?" 

Sarif asked as if it were some absurd hypothetical, but as the seconds ticked by and Adam didn't say a word, his face dropped into grim resignation. "Fuck. You are the most stubborn person I've ever met." He spread his arms theatrically, a perfect _what can you do?_ expression. "Fine, then, ask away."

"What happened la... that night?"

It hadn't been just a day ago, no matter how recent it felt. He had to keep hold of reality.

"Well, you know most of it. Terrorists attacked—"

"Vampires," Adam said, the word still strange on his tongue.

"Yeah, vampires. Whose, though, I don't have a goddamn clue. They can't have been around very long, if I've never seen them before, but if that's the case they're way too young to be that powerful."

"When you say powerful, you mean... those things they did when they were attacking."

Sarif nodded. "Busting through walls, turning into smoke..." He grimaced. "No clue what was up with that one asshole's skin thing, though, _that_ wasn't normal. Not that any of this is, I mean. Someone's been experimenting with some weird shit. Normally it would take a new vampire at least a couple decades to be able to do things like that on command. Though, of course"—Sarif smiled Adam's way—"there's always some exceptions."

Adam said, "I don't know what you mean," but halfway through his sentence it hit him. He looked down at the couch and the knifelike gouges he'd managed to dig into it, and then he stared at his hands and tried to summon up the same strange feeling that had rushed through him then.

Pitch-black scales crawled up his arms in a twisting tesseract pattern as he watched, turning soft skin into a smooth, metallic shell. Claws formed on the tips of his fingers, heavy armor on his hands—

And Adam dropped the power with a hiss of breath, clenching and unclenching his hands to rid himself of the shivery feeling running down them. "I take it I shouldn't be able to do that, then."

"Frankly, son, you're breaking just about every single rule I know right now. Pulling a move like that a week into your existence, being _awake_ two days after you were bitten. Hell, just the fact that you're able to resist blood in front of you right now." He laughed softly, shook his head. "It's like you were made for this. We get stronger as we get older: more self-control, more weird shit we can do, better able to handle the sun, the works. But you? You're acting like you're already twenty-five."

Adam didn't know how to handle that. He shook his head once, trying to clear it, and then said, "Okay. I... okay. What about the employees who were attacked? Did they get out?"

It had been chaos down there. He'd seen corpses left to bleed out in the hallways, seen the vampires tear through human guards like a knife through butter. But still, he hoped, maybe there was a chance—

"Officially, they're dead."

Adam's heart twisted unpleasantly in his chest, but he only said, "Officially?"

"It's a fucking frame job, Adam, I'm sure of it. Not that I can prove it to anyone." He tapped his nose. "When the coroner claims there's blood in the rubble matching the missing persons' DNA, _it smells completely different_ doesn't really work as a reason to keep investigating."

"But you are sure it's different."

Sarif rolled his eyes. "I _think_ I'm old enough to tell the difference between two blood samples." A pause, and then: "Before you ask, early nineteen-twenties. You can ask me about Prohibition or whatever the fuck later."

"...Wouldn't have been my first line of questioning, to be honest."

His boss was over a hundred years old. Shit. He'd always thought Sarif looked good for his age. He just hadn't realized by how much.

"So, then, let's assume these... _vampires_ "—the word was slowly becoming easier to say—"kidnapped them all. Why? What could they possibly want?"

He was slipping back into his usual role now; Sarif Industries Head of Security, at his boss's service. It was a familiar skin. Comforting.

Sarif stared at him a long moment, and then said, finally, "Adam, do you know what neuropozyne does?"

"Uh. Megan explained it to me once, but..." A lot of Megan's work had gone wildly over Adam's head.

"Yeah, well, whatever she told you, it's all bullshit." Sarif waved a dismissive hand. "Neuropozyne is a portable, storage-friendly, fully artificial blood substitute. Or, well, it would be, if someone hadn't kidnapped Reed and her whole team."

"Artificial _blood_ substitute," Adam said numbly.

Sarif nodded, excitement breaking across his features like a sunrise across the horizon. "The things it could _do_ for us! You have no idea. It could pull us out of hiding, let us coexist properly instead of lurking in the shadows like a bunch of shitty fifties B-movie villains. There's a new era waiting for us, and neuopozyne is what's going to kickstart it. Shit, Adam, when I first saw the Patient X sample..." And then he shook his head, suddenly very much back in the present. "Well, don't worry about that. It's not important right now."

 _Sure_ , Adam thought, staring at his boss. Still, he was right about one thing—however Sarif had managed to make this miracle drug wasn't his main concern. "So this is a serum designed to help vampires. And a bunch of vampires came in, kidnapped the scientists, and stole everything? If they just wanted to finish the formula before you could, there had to be an easier way."

"True," Sarif said. "They don't want to just control it. They took the research, the scientists, destroyed the lab. They want to control who else knows it even existed to begin with."

"I don't understand why they'd bother to pull this whole frame-up in the first place."

"Look. As far as vampires go, I'm on the young side. There's creatures out there three, five, ten times my age. Older than electricity. To them, blood is everything. They've built a system over the past hundreds and hundreds of years—a complicated power structure that protects humanity from the shadows, according to their own definition of _protects_ , and, _coincidentally_ "—flat sarcasm laced the word—"keeps them in power and running things just how they like it. They're very experienced. And they don't like change."

" _Especially_ change that could completely destroy the system of power they've been on top of for longer than either of us have been alive," Adam said. He was beginning to see the bigger picture now. He didn't like it. "So, our suspect list is—"

"Zhao Yun Ru, Lucius DeBeers,"—Sarif held a hand out, counting them off on his fingers—"Bob Page, Elizabeth DuClare, Morgan Everett... Darrow, technically, but this isn't his style. A couple others besides, but those are the main players." He grimaced. "Oh, and fucking Taggart, too. If we're lucky, it'll be him. I wouldn't mind tearing that asshole's throat out."

Adam blinked. "...Is _every_ pharmaceutical CEO a secret vampire?"

Sarif snorted. "Not exactly. But it does help, being rich enough that you can ask for whatever weird shit you need and people will just call you an eccentric. Lounging around in a castle dungeon and hissing at rats doesn't cut it these days unless you've got a killer 401k."

Eccentric behavior, avoidance of sunlight, in a position where they could amass power or make money... "Wait," Adam said, "then, is Pritchard—?"

Sarif's startled laugh was the biggest relief Adam had gotten today. "Oh, god, no, can you imagine? No, Pritchard's just a programmer."

Right. _Right_. Just a programmer. Adam tried to force his mind back on topic—there were things he still needed to discuss, questions he had to ask his boss—but the pain was thrumming through his body had started up worse than ever. It was as if the lacerations that flayed vampire had left him with were opening up again. His skin itched, his hands shook. His skull felt like it was throbbing in time with the heartbeat he no longer had. 

Sarif inched closer towards him. "Come on," he said, "you know this isn't right. I'm aching just looking at you."

Adam ought to have snarled at him, but he didn't have the energy. And anyway, this was Sarif—Sarif who had hidden this from him, Sarif who had saved his life. (What was left of it, anyway; the thought of an endless night stretched out before him, too horrible to begin to contemplate.) He didn't have the energy to fight him anymore.

"It's donated," Adam said, "It's... it's not..."

"No one died for this, Adam," Sarif said gently.

"Okay." Adam shut his eyes tight. Took a deep breath, unnecessary except for the calm it gave him. Opened them again to stare up at Sarif. "I'll eat."

Sarif smiled at him. There was relief in his expression, and something else Adam didn't know how to name. "Thank you." His hand disappeared into the bag a moment, then came back out sticky with blood.

"I can feed myself."

"You won't be able to latch yet. Your teeth are still settling." He held his fingers out. "Please, Adam. Let me help you."

Sarif lay loose and still against the couch. His fangs gleamed bright. A predator in repose. Adam nodded, slowly, and crawled forward to take Sarif's fingers into his mouth.

"There you go," Sarif said.

Adam sucked the blood off his fingers again and again, feeling as strange and helpless and monstrous as he ever had in his life. He couldn't stop imagining someone finding him like this—Megan, Pritchard, he didn't even _know_ —and cringing back in horror. Was he going to be like this forever, a desperate animal too fixated on human blood to even hold a conversation? Or was it possible he'd get even worse? Sarif didn't seem much like the vampires in the old monster movies, but those stereotypes had to exist for a reason. If Adam ended up preying on innocent people...

No. If that was what he was destined to become, he'd find his own way out. So long as he lasted long enough to save Megan, what happened after didn't matter to him.

As Sarif fed him, he kept up a steady stream of one-sided conversation; answers, Adam suspected, to all the questions he knew Adam had been wanting to ask. Adam couldn't help but appreciate the gesture.

"...When I found you," Sarif was saying, "your ribs were poking straight through your skin. Anyone could tell it was bad. You smelled..." He shuddered. Adam couldn't tell if it was horror or desire he was remembering. "I told the EMTs I was going to call someone to airlift you to a private medical facility, and I had them bring you here." His free hand stroked along the curve of Adam's cheek. "It's not easy, you know, to do the whole process. I thought I was going to lose you for sure. But I opened myself up"—and here he flipped his hand wrist up to show Adam the red, scabbed-over wound standing out starkly on the pale skin of his forearm. Adam hadn't realized that Sarif had hurt himself for Adam—"and I fed you enough of my blood that you might have a chance. And then, once I thought you'd gotten enough, I found a spot where you weren't going to bleed it out immediately for the bite." He shook his head, half-caught in the memory. "You were _amazing_ , Adam. Right from the start, your blood..."

There was useful info there, but Adam couldn't focus on it. Sarif's hand had drifted lower while he spoke. As he talked at Adam, his fingers twitched just enough to brush against a spot just above his heart.

Adam hissed out from between his teeth. At the sound, Sarif all but jumped backward, nearly ripping his hand out of Adam's mouth in the process. "Shit. Sorry."

That had to be the point where Sarif had bitten Adam. It hadn't felt bad to have it touched, though. It had felt anything but bad. Adam met Sarif's gaze, and then flicked his eyes back down towards the spot he'd just touched. _Do that again_.

"Fuck, son, you can't just—"

"You don't want to?" Adam pulled his mouth away long enough to ask.

"I didn't say _that_. It's just—a bit frowned-upon, seeing as you're so new. I should be giving you time to acclimatize."

Adam didn't feel _new_. He felt inescapably old, if anything, suddenly aware of his own newfound lack-of-mortality. He met Sarif's eyes deliberately, matching his boss's gaze with his own predator's stare, and wrapped one hand around Sarif's free hand. He dragged both their tangled hands upward together, and then—slowly, deliberately—pressed their tangled-together hands against the bite scar.

The first touch had Adam gasping, squirming against the upholstery to keep himself in place. More than blood, more than _anything_ , he needed—

" _Christ_ , Adam," Sarif breathed, and started running his fingers against Adam's mark in earnest.

They kept on like that. For how long, Adam didn't know; his entire world had narrowed down to Sarif's iron-tasting fingers against his tongue and Sarif's smooth fingers against his skin. He took them both, desperate, whining like an animal, completely beyond shame or self-awareness or anything except the twin feelings of agony and overwhelming desire that coursed through him. 

The blood grew thinner and thinner on Sarif's fingers, from a thick coating to a smear, as the pain grew less and less. Until finally, Sarif leaned close to Adam and said, "This is the last of it. Let me help you." His fingers twisted cruelly against Adam's scar, then, nails digging into the sensitive skin.

Adam sucked in a deep, shaky breath as his body tensed and he came against Sarif's fingers.

It didn't feel like it had before. There was a strange pain to it, as if his body could hardly remember what it was meant to be doing. The pleasure, though... that was more now too. He shuddered against it, helpless, angry at Sarif and yet so desperate for him he could've crawled into his lap and begged for another round.

He'd come completely untouched, from nothing more than sucking on his boss's blood-soaked fingers and rubbing against his boss's hand on the scar where he'd bitten Adam. He didn't know what that meant, or what he wanted it to mean. His body felt like some strange foreign machine he only barely was connected to.

(Adam did know one thing, though, in the moment when he groaned and gasped out Sarif's name: he wanted to do exactly the same to him. Wanted to pin his boss down and leave him sucking blood off Adam's body, wanted to press his hands up against him until he moaned and begged. The twin images—owning Sarif, being owned by Sarif—swam together in his mind until he could hardly tell the difference between the two.)

Sarif held him, after, clutching at Adam like he was a lifeline. Neither of them moved. Neither of them breathed.

\---

When sunset fell, Sarif took him to the roof of the building. The night was warm; the world beneath him seemed sharper and clearer than it ever had before, like his vision was turned to high definition. The breeze carried with it scents that Adam shouldn't have been able to notice: the lilac-soft perfume of a woman standing at the entrance of the SI building, a hundred and twenty stories down; the heavy, earthy clay that made up the Detroit river's distant banks, exhaust and stale motor oil; and above, it all, the sweetness of blood pounding through a hundred thousand humans' veins.

"Here we are," Sarif said with a proud smile. "One of these decades we'll have you jumping off of here without a care in the world, but for now let's starting with something a little— _Adam_?"

Already two steps from the building's edge, Adam didn't stop. He kept his full-on sprint even as the concrete ended in front of him, braced himself for one brief moment and then jumped.

He could have told himself he wanted to die once and for all. It would have made more sense. But he fell and he fell and he fell and as the ground whirled beneath him he thought, _Please_.

Sarif could say what he wanted about the rules of vampires, but there was something inside of Adam already. It was as if he had a word stuck on the tip of his tongue, only everywhere inside of him all at once. And when he'd used that first power, his hands turning to plague-black claws as he clenched them tight, it hadn't felt like discovering. It had felt like remembering.

He couldn't wait for these things to come to him naturally. There wasn't time enough for that. Megan was counting on him. _Sarif_ was counting on him; with everything that had happened, that felt more important than it ever had before.

Twenty feet from the ground, concrete rushing up to meet him, golden light exploded around Adam. It felt like sparks, like lightning. Like wings.

He hit the ground (feet first, stumbling, falling to his knees) and that strange deja vu unfurled inside him, a sibling to the one he'd found before. 

There were others like it. They ached like muscles left unused. Adam was going to uncover them all.

Adam rose to his feet once more. He turned around to face the building, and waved up towards the faraway, crystal-clear form of his slack-mouthed boss still standing on the roof.

 _Wait for me_ , he thought, thinking not of Megan but of the flayed-open vampire who'd torn Adam apart, _I'm coming to find you_.

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't reference "I never asked for this" even once in this fic. My self-restraint has never been so tested.


End file.
